Raphael Stevens

Candy giant Mars has set a goal to reach $1 billion in global ice cream sales by 2030.
The family-owned company is investing $70 million in its Burr Ridge, Illinois, factory to help it achieve its sales target.
Mars aims to grow its share of the ice cream market as part of a broad-based business.

Dove Ice Cream Bars are packaged at Mars’ factory in Burr Ridge, Illinois.
Source: Mars

Candy giant Mars is trying to make a name for itself in a new category: ice cream.
The family-owned company aims for its ice cream business to reach $1 billion in sales worldwide by 2030. In May, Mars tapped executive Anton Vincent to lead its global ice cream business, adding to his existing role as president of Mars Wrigley North America.

Mars faces tough competition to achieve its ambition in the U.S., but the company has been investing into the business. It has spent $50 million upgrading its Burr Ridge, Illinois, ice cream factory and earmarked an additional $20 million for the facility that it hasn’t spent yet.
Mars has also been expanding its portfolio, rolling out new flavors such as M&M’s Cookies and Cream Ice Cream Cookie Sandwiches and Twix Cookie Dough Ice Cream. It used its $5 billion acquisition of Kind North America, best known for its nut bars, to push into plant-based ice cream substitutes.
While summer is still the biggest season for ice cream sales, Mars is also trying to boost business in the fall and winter through a partnership between the National Football League and its Snickers Ice Cream Bar.
Mars aims to grow its share of the ice cream market as part of a broad-based business. Outside of candy and ice cream, Mars also owns a large pet care segment and other food brands, including Combos Stuffed Snacks and Ben’s Original rice.
The bet on ice cream has paid off for the company. In the last five years, Mars’ global ice cream sales have risen 42%. The Dove Ice Cream brand alone grew 12% last year. As the segment grows, the U.S. accounts for more than half the company’s ice cream business.

As Mars injects resources into the ice cream business, the company will find out if its familiar brands are enough to carry it to its ambitious $1 billion sales target.

Mars’ ice cream goals hinge on the old and the new

Mars entered the ice cream category in 1986 when it bought Dove, then known just for its ice cream bars before the candy company expanded it into chocolate. Three years later, Mars introduced the Snickers Ice Cream Bar, now the top seller in its portfolio, followed by M&M’s Ice Cream Cookie Sandwiches.
“We don’t have the biggest ice cream brands, but we do believe we have the biggest brands in ice cream,” Shaf Lalani, the U.S. head of Mars Ice Cream, told CNBC.
Today, Mars ranks among the top 10 U.S. ice cream makers by retail sales, according to Euromonitor International data. But it is far outstripped by Haagen-Dazs owner General Mills; Ben & Jerry’s parent Unilever; and Blue Bell Creameries, which is privately owned.
“Mars Inc. ice cream brands face hefty competition, being ranks away from the leading spot in the U.S. ice cream market,” said Carl Quash, Euromonitor’s head of food and nutrition research.
As it tries to make up that ground, Mars’ primary strategy to grow its ice cream sales focuses on reversing what it did with Dove: taking other candy brands and turning them into frozen treats.
“There’s about a 64% crossover rate to people that buy our confectionary products and participate in our brands, which has given us a lot of confidence that we have the right to win,” Lalani said.
Outside of Snickers and M&M’s, Mars’ other candy brands show promise in their transition over to ice cream. Twix Ice Cream is the fastest-growing product in the company’s ice cream portfolio. Lalani thinks the frozen version of the Milky Way candy bar — known as the Mars bar outside the U.S. — has the potential to be its next big hit.
While Lalani said Mars’ existing portfolio has plenty of runway, not all of Mars Ice Cream’s growth will be organic. Acquisitions will also help fuel sales and bring new customers.
For example, Kind’s frozen treats entered Whole Foods a few months ago, adding a new retail chain to Mars’ frozen footprint.
In December, Mars announced it was buying Tru Fru, a startup that makes frozen and freeze-dried chocolate-covered fruit. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Inside the ice cream factory

Dove Bars are dipped in chocolate at the factory.
Source: Mars

Nearly four decades ago, when Mars bought Dove, it also purchased the brand’s manufacturing facility in Burr Ridge, Illinois. These days, the factory is responsible for making all the ice cream the company sells in the U.S., which accounts for 55% of its demand worldwide.
As sales have accelerated, the company has had to invest in the sprawling facility to add capacity and the capability to make new products, such as Kind’s frozen treats studded with nuts. The factory has distinct lines dedicated to the types of products Mars makes: sandwiches, bars and sticks.
Mars’ manufacturing process is largely automated, and workers stand by to monitor the machines. Many of the ingredients come from elsewhere — the ice cream mix and M&M cookies from regional suppliers, the peanuts from Mars’ roasting facility — and they all come together in the Burr Ridge factory.
But it’s a delicate process, requiring precision to balance consistency, quality and the temperature demands of ice cream.
For example, the Snickers Ice Cream Bars feature a layer of ice cream, the candy’s signature peanuts and caramel and a chocolate exterior. Inside the chilly factory, the chocolate has to stay warm enough to melt on top of the ice cream bar, which the conveyor belt then quickly moves through a freezing tunnel, so the ice cream doesn’t melt.
From there, the Snickers Ice Cream Bars move past sensors that detect production mistakes, such as being too large or too small. The Snickers’ peanuts are often the culprit.
The machine swiftly pushes the rejects aside, joining a crowd of fellow outcasts in melting slowly. The floors of the production line are dusted with the chocolate ashes of those that fell short of Mars’ standards. To keep the ice cream bars from melting, the conveyor belt has to move quickly, leaving no time to correct the misfits.
But those that make the cut move down to be wrapped in Snickers’ packaging. Mechanical arms use small vacuums to pick up the Snickers bars without crushing them and place them into wrappers, which are then put into individual boxes and placed in cartons.
New products also bring new manufacturing challenges. For example, Kind’s frozen bars are meant to taste the same with every bite taken, but the chunks of nuts presented difficulties meeting that level of consistency, according to Romain Lepicard, head of the Mars Ice Cream research and development team.
The $50 million Mars spent already largely went toward upgrading the line dedicated to its ice cream bars, which can churn out several hundred thousand Snickers Ice Cream Bars per day. The investment also went toward some other tech upgrades, such as digital screens that will help the facility go paper free.
Mars will spend the additional $20 million investment on further boosting how many ice cream bars the factory can make. The company plans to invest in equipment that will help it make more of the components for the Snickers Ice Cream Bars, such as caramel, plus other upgrades to capacity for the manufacturing line. More

Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount Global and Fox have all had major setbacks in 2023.
The legacy media industry is in retrenchment mode as Hollywood writers strike and Netflix bounces back.
Without a clear growth narrative, it’s hard to see how legacy media companies bounce back soon.

Bob Iger, CEO of The Walt Disney Company, left; David Zaslav, CEO and president of Warner Bros. Discovery, center; and Bob Bakish, president and CEO of Paramount Global.
Getty Images

Companies and industries have ups and downs. The legacy media industry is in a valley.
The first half of 2023 has been a colossal disappointment for media executives who wanted this year to be a rebound from a terrible 2022, when a slowdown in streaming subscribers cut valuations for Netflix, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount Global roughly in half.

Instead, investors have once again become excited by Netflix’s future prospects as it’s cracked down on password sharing, potentially leading to tens of millions of new signups. Netflix shares have surged the past five months, outpacing the S&P 500.
Meanwhile, the legacy players can’t get out of their own way.

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Netflix vs the S&P 500 over the past five months.

“When it rains it pours,” said LightShed media analyst Rich Greenfield. “It just keeps getting worse.”
It’s been a bumpy ride for Disney Chief Executive Officer Bob Iger since he returned to lead the company late last year. Disney recently finished laying off 7,000 employees. Chief Financial Officer Christine McCarthy stepped down last week. The company is pulling programming from its streaming services to save money. Its animation business is in a major rut, with its latest Pixar movie, “Elemental,” recording the lowest opening weekend gross for the studio since the original “Toy Story” premiered in 1995. Shares have struggled in the past five months.

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Disney vs. the S&P 500 over the past five months.

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Warner Bros. Discovery vs. the S&P 500 over the past five months.

Paramount Global cut its dividend last quarter as streaming losses peak this year and a weak advertising market exacerbates a terminally ill cable network business. Wells Fargo released an analyst note Friday saying the bull case and the bear case for the company were the same: selling for parts. Warren Buffett, perhaps the most acclaimed investor in history, told CNBC that Paramount’s streaming offering “fundamentally is not that good of a business.”

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Paramount Global vs the S&P 500 over the past five months.

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Fox Corp. vs the S&P 500 over the past five months.

NBCUniversal has weathered the storm the best, shielded by its parent company, Comcast, which gets its revenue from cable and wireless assets. It’s also taken advantage of missteps from the aforementioned. MSNBC became the No. 1 cable news network this month for the first time in 120 weeks, dethroning Fox News amid coverage of former President Donald Trump’s federal indictment. Universal’s “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” is by far the biggest box office hit of the year, yet shares haven’t moved much.

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Comcast vs the S&P 500 over the past five months.

All of this is happening with an extended Hollywood writers’ strike going on in the background with no end in sight. The writers know the longer the strike lasts, the more pain will be inflicted on media companies, who will eventually run out of already-made scripted content. Zaslav recently gave a commencement address to Boston University and was drowned out by boos and chants of “pay your writers.”
This week may bring even more bad news. Film and TV actors are set to join writers on strike unless they reach a deal with Hollywood studios by Friday.
The beneficiary of Hollywood work shutdowns will likely be YouTube, TikTok, and Netflix, which continues to churn out international content that is unaffected by the strike, said Greenfield.
Legacy media may get a small reprieve if advertising jumps back as the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign heats up. But there’s still scant evidence investors will reward media companies for simply cutting costs. There’s currently no strong growth narrative for legacy media, and consolidation prospects are murky as regulators block media-adjacent deals such as Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision and Penguin Random House’s proposed purchase of Simon & Schuster.
The industry just wrapped up its annual advertising gala in Cannes, France. Legacy media executives still spent company dollars to make the trip to hang out on yachts and drink rosé. The backdrop was as beautiful as ever.
But the landscape is bleak.
Disclosure: Comcast owns NBCUniversal, which is the parent company of CNBC.
WATCH: WPP CEO Mark Read on the state of the advertising market, from Cannes Lions 2023 More

Sweetgreen’s first automated Infinite Kitchen location, in Naperville, Illinois, has been operating since early May.
CEO Jonathan Neman told investors weeks later that the salad chain expects all of its stores to be automated eventually.
Sweetgreen hopes that the Infinite Kitchen will cut down on labor costs and improve the customer experience.

In early May, Sweetgreen opened its first automated location, in the Chicago suburb of Naperville, Illinois. After only a few weeks operating the restaurant, the salad chain is preparing to go all in on the technology to cut labor costs and improve the customer experience.
But in the early days of the automation trial, only time will tell if customers, employees and investors prefer the new way of making salads and warm bowls.

The restaurant industry has historically been slow to adapt to new technology. Eateries’ razor-thin profit margins mean most don’t want to invest in expensive technology that might not work out for their kitchens or dining rooms.
But with its so-called Infinite Kitchen, Sweetgreen joins the legion of restaurant companies incorporating automation into their businesses. Starbucks and Chipotle Mexican Grill are among the big names exploring artificial intelligence or robots. Some experiments, such as McDonald’s test of AI voice ordering for drive-thru lanes, haven’t resulted in nationwide launches.
But it looks like Sweetgreen has more faith.
“In five years, we do expect eventually all Sweetgreen stores to be automated,” CEO Jonathan Neman told investors at the William Blair Growth Stock Conference this month.
Sweetgreen plans to open a second Infinite Kitchen location later this year. The company hasn’t disclosed the location but said it will retrofit an existing location with the technology.

Why Sweetgreen chose automation

Sweetgreen jumped into automation in August 2021. Just months before it went public, the salad chain purchased Spyce for roughly $50 million, although the final valuation depends on the performance of the startup’s technology, according to regulatory filings.
Spyce was the brainchild of four MIT graduates, who founded the company in 2015. They created the robotic technology to make and serve healthy meals for an affordable price. The startup opened two restaurants in the Boston area before Sweetgreen bought it.
A month after Sweetgreen acquired Spyce, and before it closed Spyce’s restaurants, the salad chain brought a few menu items to try out in one of Spyce’s locations.
Sweetgreen then worked on how to make the robotic kitchen function for its restaurants.
“The core foundations of the IK were the same. What we focused on is making it operationally easy to interact with as a team member — to stock, to clean, to maintain. There were also some tweaks to protect food quality,” Timothy Noonan, Sweetgreen’s vice president of operations strategy and concept design, told CNBC.
The chain had to work out how to dispense goat cheese, which clumps easily, and cherry tomatoes, which could be easily squished. It also tweaked the technology to ensure consistent portions, whether for airy arugula or heavier toppings such as sunflower seeds. Sweetgreen also added the ability to rotate bowls as they move along the conveyor belt that fills dishes, ensuring even distribution of components, and the capacity to mix the ingredients together at the end.
“We have an amazing team, but it’s really hard to keep it perfectly accurate and consistent,” Neman told CNBC. “And the other amazing thing is that the peaks don’t feel crazy. It’s not like some of our stores in New York. This allows us to be there, to serve more people, and this will have it feel a lot smoother.”
After months testing the technology in the lab, Sweetgreen decided to try it out in Naperville, adding it to a new restaurant that was originally slated to be a traditional location.
“We want to understand how suburban customers interact with this,” Noonan said.

Inside the Infinite Kitchen

The exterior of Sweetgreen’s Naperville location
Source: Sweetgreen

While Sweetgreen may tout labor savings to investors, the Naperville location was designed to put a face on the finished orders.
The restaurant’s exterior features a large window that shows Sweetgreen workers preparing the ingredients that will make their way into the Infinite Kitchen’s dispensers and eventually into finished orders.
“It starts with human hands, and we have people finishing off the bowls after they’re produced by the machine, so it ends with human hands,” Noonan said.

The Naperville location displays Sweetgreen merch and drinks before customers place their orders at tablets.
Source: Sweetgreen

Upon entering the restaurant, customers pass by a display refrigerator of drinks and a rack of Sweetgreen-branded sweatshirts and t-shirts to order their food. A large digital menu board hangs above the display, flashing recommendations for new customers. 
“We know that our menu for some customers can be a little overwhelming,” Noonan said.
Customers can order from one of five tablets set up in the middle of the store. If none are available, diners can order on the app instead of waiting in line. Unlike the traditional Sweetgreen restaurant, customers won’t have to wait 10 to 15 minutes to pick up mobile orders.
For now, an employee hangs around the tablets to help customers place their orders. Sweetgreen is still deciding how much of a human presence it needs during that step, Noonan said.

Behind the ordering counter is the Infinite Kitchen, which assembles customers’ salads and warm bowls.
Source: Sweetgreen

Behind the counter is the “Infinite Kitchen,” which resembles the bulk food dispensers found in some grocery stores. The dispensers hold nearly all of the ingredients to assemble customers’ warm bowls and salads.
After an order is placed, the Infinite Kitchen begins assembling the bowl, starting with dressing on the bottom. Then come the greens and the grains, followed by the rest of the selected toppings. At each stop, the bowls rotate slightly, allowing the new ingredients to go in an empty spot. The bowls glide past dispensers for ingredients they don’t need, unless a dish in front blocks their path.
The final automated step is mixing the salads or bowls. A worker waits at the end of the assembly line to add herbs, avocado and fish — all of which the Infinite Kitchen can’t add yet.
“There’s still a couple of things we have to do by hand, but we believe that the focus will allow us better accuracy,” Noonan said. “We still wanted someone to check the orders.”
The conveyor belt can hold up to 20 bowls, with room to add more if needed, and can make up to 600 bowls an hour if none need to be mixed, according to Noonan.
Even behind the scenes, the setup is deceptively simple. Stairs behind the end of the assembly line lead to a mezzanine level where the dispensers can be reloaded. Screens show if any ingredients are running low or signal any possible malfunctions, such as an overfilled dispenser.
If any dispensers stop working, the ingredients can be moved down to a different spot or added by hand at the end of the process. But overall, workers are relatively hands off in the Infinite Kitchen.

Fruits of automation’s labor

Wall Street primarily cares about automation’s ability to cut labor costs, though Sweetgreen and other restaurant chains deny it is their only motivation to explore the technology.
T.D. Cowen estimated last year that about 30% of Sweetgreen’s costs are labor, with half of its staff preparing food and the other half assembling orders. Cutting down on labor means increasing profit margins. Sweetgreen is already profitable at the restaurant level, although the company overall has yet to turn a profit.
It’s clear already that the Infinite Kitchen means fewer Sweetgreen workers in restaurants. Noonan said locations with the Infinite Kitchen can rely on roughly half the workers of a traditional location. They don’t need to beef up how many workers are scheduled for five-hour shifts to deal with the overwhelming peak periods — which only last about 90 minutes.
“Part of the beauty of this is being able to keep the same size team and let the machine absorb the peak,” Noonan said.
Employees have to set up the Infinite Kitchen in the morning, ensuring it’s well-stocked and calibrated for accurate and consistent portions. Throughout the day, workers will watch digital screens that will tell them if any dispensers are running low on ingredients or experiencing any issues. At the end of the day, employees will have to clean the system.
Sweetgreen anticipates some secondary labor benefits, as well. Workers at the Naperville location didn’t need extra training, and down the line, training for Infinite Kitchen locations should be faster.
“A big part of training in a typical restaurant involves not just training the prep processes, but figuring out how to memorize our core menu items,” Noonan said.
Neman also said that the calmer restaurant environment might mean employees stick around longer, reducing turnover, a common problem in the restaurant industry.

Customer reactions

So far, customers have barely noticed the automation, according to Noonan. He said they often think that the ordering tablets are the automated tools and mistake the Infinite Kitchen for a fridge displaying ingredients.
But it doesn’t seem like the location’s use of automation will alienate many customers. Broadly, consumers are growing more comfortable with technology in restaurants. A Deloitte survey conducted in March found that 60% of respondents reported being somewhat likely to order from a kitchen that prepares food at least partially using robotic technologies. That’s up from 54% in the consulting firm’s survey two years ago.
Buzz about the Naperville restaurant’s use of automation seems to be generating interest, although it’s too soon to tell if the crowds will still be there in a few months. Rich Shank, vice president of research and insights for Chicago-based Technomic, told CNBC that his coworkers have reported long lines during busy lunch and dinner hours. Shank is waiting for consumers’ curiosity to die down before he visits.
The changes to in-person ordering may contribute to the long lines. A traditional Sweetgreen location allows customers to make up their minds about their customized meals as they move along the assembly line, telling employees what ingredients they want. This approach usually leads to lines during busy times — but they tend to move relatively quickly.
But at Naperville, customers don’t have the same chance to look at a display of ingredients. The tablets’ format will be familiar to anyone used to Sweetgreen’s website and mobile app, but it can create a bottleneck for customers who aren’t as certain about their orders.
One Yelp reviewer said the line to order went out the door, just because it took customers several minutes to order.
“That may be the downfall of this establishment because had we walked in 5 minutes later and seen that line we would have walked past and eaten someplace else,” the customer wrote in the review.
It’s a common issue for fast-casual restaurants that have built their menus around customization, according to Shank.
“The verdict is out on whether the user interface of any sort of kiosk can solve that problem,” Shank said.
On a more basic level, customers could also realize that they want a human to assemble their orders.
“It is faster for a human to hear the customization that the customer requires and to make adjustments on the fly. The machine, at least in its present form, doesn’t sound like it’s able to handle the improvisation that often happens on the line, like ‘I don’t want that much sauce’ or ‘Can you make it extra light on the dressing?'” Shank said.
And, of course, there’s always the potential for the Infinite Kitchen’s technology to fail, despite Sweetgreen’s best efforts to eliminate errors that would take down the system. The layout of the Naperville location wasn’t created with back-up make lines that would allow employees to assemble orders by hand quickly. More

Oddity, the beauty and tech company that founded Il Makiage and Spoiled Child, has filed to go public as the IPO market warms up.
The Israel-based company plans to trade on the Nasdaq using the ticker ODD.
Since its U.S. launch, Oddity has achieved profitability, and it brought in $395 million in gross revenue and $500 million in sales in 2022, the company said previously.

Oddity Il Makiage
Coutesy: Oddity

Beauty and tech company Oddity, which runs the Il Makiage and Spoiled Child brands, filed to go public Friday as the once-frozen IPO market warms up. 
The Israel-based company plans to trade on the Nasdaq using the ticker ODD. The company didn’t immediately disclose how the offering would be priced in regulatory filings and declined comment when asked when the numbers would be released.

“The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the proposed offering have not yet been determined. The offering is subject to market conditions, and there can be no assurance as to whether or when the offering may be completed, or as to the actual size or terms of the offering,” Oddity said in a press release.
Launched in 2018 by brother and sister duo Oran Holtzman and Shiran Holtzman-Erel, Oddity uses data and AI to develop brands and make tailored product recommendations for customers.
The business is seeking to disrupt a market long dominated by legacy retailers by replacing the in-store experience with product recommendations driven by AI and data. At the heart of its business model is its proprietary technology — including tech developed by a former Israeli defense official — and the billions of data points it has collected from its millions of users.
In the three months that ended March 31, the company saw $165.65 million in revenue, up from $90.41 million in the year-ago period. It reported a net income of $19.59 million, or $5.34 a share, compared with $3.01 million, or 82 cents a share, a year earlier.
Numbers revealed in its regulatory filing show the direct-to-consumer retailer has been profitable on an annual basis since at least 2020.

In fiscal 2022, Oddity brought in $324.52 million in sales and saw a net income of $21.73 million, or $5.94 a share. In the year prior, the retailer saw $222.56 million in revenue and a net income of $13.92 million, or $4.01 a share.
In 2020, it saw $110.64 million in sales and a net income of $11.71 million, or $3.45 a share.
By comparison, when E.L.F. Beauty filed to go public in August 2016, its profits and sales were lower than Oddity’s. E.L.F., a multibrand beauty company, saw $144.94 million in sales in fiscal 2014 and a net loss of $2.88 million. The following year, it saw $191.41 million in sales and a net income of $4.36 million. 
In fiscal 2016, it brought in $229.57 million in sales and a net income of $5.31 million. 
Since going public, E.L.F.’s sales and profits have climbed. During its most recent fiscal year, which ended March 31, it saw $578.84 million in sales and a net income of $61.53 million. 
As a direct-to-consumer retailer, Oddity is seeing the high margins that come along with the strategy. In the three months that ended March 31, its gross margins were 71%, up 4 percentage points from 67% in the year-ago period. Its annual margins have slipped each year since 2020 as the company has made acquisitions and invested in growing the business.
In 2020, Oddity had an annual gross margin of 70%, and in 2021, it dropped 1 percentage point to 69%. In 2022, the retailer’s annual gross margin was 67%, down 2 percentage points from the year-ago period.
As of March 31, the company had more than 4 million active customers, which it defines as a unique customer account that made at least one purchase in the preceding 12-month period.
“We bring visitors to our website, turn visitors into users by asking questions and learning about them, and then leverage the data we have across the platform to convert them into paying customers,” a regulatory filing says.
Oddity has launched internationally, and sales from those markets accounted for about 26% and 27% of its net revenue in fiscal 2022 and 2021, respectively. As of Friday, Oddity has launched in the U.S., Canada, U.K., continental Europe and Australia. It noted it has plans to keep growing that footprint.
The company plans to use proceeds from the IPO to develop and launch new brands. It will also use the funds for working capital, other general corporate purposes and potentially for acquisitions and other investments.
During an interview earlier this year, the company’s global chief financial officer, Lindsay Drucker Mann, a former Goldman Sachs executive, told CNBC that Oddity is making money and growing — even against a tough macroeconomic environment that has proven increasingly risky for purely digital retailers. 
On average, Oddity’s gross sales have doubled each year since 2018, the company has said.
In Spoiled Child’s first year on the market, the new brand brought in $48 million in gross sales, which does not include returns. 
In a regulatory filing, Holtzman, the company’s CEO and co-founder, said the company recruits from the Israeli Defense Forces’ best technology units. Technologists comprise over 40% of its global head count.
“As industry outsiders, we saw many shortcomings in the status quo approach. The empires that incumbents had built over decades had not evolved with the times, resulting in a significant lag in online adoption,” Holtzman wrote in a founder’s letter enclosed in a securities filing.
“Their underinvestment in technology left the category behind the digital curve, despite a consumer who is inherently primed to buy online — spending significant time on social media for beauty content and rapidly shifting dollars online in other categories.”

(L to R): Dr. David Zhang, Oddity’s new head of bioengineering and the chief science officer and co-founder of Revela; Oddity co-founder Shiran Holtzman-Erel; Oddity co-founder and CEO Oran Holtzman; Dr. Evan Zhou, Oddity’s new chief science officer and Revela’s co-founder and CEO.
Alberto Vasari for ODDITY

Beyond developing new products and brands, Oddity is also trying to make beauty products more effective, the company has said. 
In late April, it announced it was investing more than $100 million to acquire biotech startup Revela and open a U.S.-based lab.
The merger brought to Oddity a team of scientists tasked with creating brand-new molecules, using artificial intelligence, that can be used in its cosmetics brands and future lines.
In 2021, Oddity acquired Voyage81, a deep tech AI-based computational imaging startup founded in 2019 by Niv Price, the former head of research and development for one of the Israeli Defense Forces’ elite technological units, along with Dr. Boaz Arad, Dr. Rafi Gidron and Omer Shwartz.
The technology is capable of mapping and analyzing skin and hair features, detecting facial blood flows, and creating melanin and hemoglobin maps using a regular smartphone camera.
The filing comes after a year and a half of a drought in the initial public offering market, which is just beginning to open up and show signs of green shoots. 
Earlier this month, Mediterranean restaurant chain Cava went public, and its shares soared as much as 117% in its market debut. 
“[In 2022] investors didn’t want to go anywhere near IPOs but now that they’re making money again, and with issuers seeing that they can achieve close to decent valuations, I think that’s bringing the people back into the market,” said Matt Kennedy, a senior IPO market strategist for Renaissance Capital.
“The consumer sector does lend itself to these periods where investors can see a business model that they understand, a business that they might be familiar with and also one that is typically profitable or near profitable, preferably that has growth.” More

Southwest Airlines said Friday that it has reached a tentative agreement with the union representing its mechanics, aircraft inspectors, maintenance controllers and training instructors.
The agreement, which covers more than 2,800 employees, would still need to be approved by those workers.
Southwest and the unions representing its pilots and flight attendants are still negotiating labor deals.

A worker directs a Southwest Airlines Co. Boeing 737 passenger jet pushing back from a gate at Midway International Airport (MDW) in Chicago, Illinois, U.S., on Monday, Oct. 11, 2021.
Luke Sharrett | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Southwest Airlines said Friday that it has reached a tentative agreement with the union representing its mechanics, aircraft inspectors, maintenance controllers and training instructors.
The agreement, which covers more than 2,800 employees, would still need to be approved by those workers.

“Our Mechanics & Related Employees work around the clock to safely maintain our aircraft, and we reached a Tentative Agreement that rewards them and helps Southwest maintain an efficient operation,” Adam Carlisle, vice president of labor relations at Southwest, said in a press release.
The union and airline didn’t immediately disclose the details of the agreement but said they would in the coming days.
The union’s “goal and objective is to protect work, raise standards, and increase recognition of AMTs and related professionals,” said the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association’s national president, Bret Oestreich.
Meanwhile, negotiations for new contracts between Southwest and the unions representing its pilots and flight attendants are still pending.
Earlier this month, leaders at Transport Workers Union of America 556, which represents Southwest flight attendants, said they rebuffed a tentative agreement that would have allowed for a membership vote. The union said that federal mediators and the parties involved will not reconvene until Jan. 16.

“We are proud of the Agreement in Principle that was reached by the Southwest and TWU 556 Negotiating Teams, and we’re incredibly disappointed to learn that TWU 556’s Executive Board voted it down,” Southwest’s Carlisle said in a statement.
Last week, the local’s executive board told members: “Your TWU Local 556 Executive Board did not make this decision lightly. As Members ourselves, we are just as eager to vote on and ratify a worthy Tentative Agreement.”
Apart from the aviation industry, workers across the board have been striving for better compensation and better work rules, with many of their efforts culminating in strikes. Despite strike authorizations at some airline unions, such actions are extremely rare in the industry and require federal involvement.
Beginning on Friday in Seattle, nearly 3,500 workers at some Starbucks stores at more than 150 locations across the U.S. pledged to strike following a public dispute between the coffee giant and the union representing baristas regarding allegations that the company prohibited Pride Month decorations in its cafes.
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters has approved a strike authorization at UPS should the union and the company not reach a new labor agreement. The current national contract is scheduled to expire after July 31.
Southwest shares were down nearly 1% on Friday afternoon.
–CNBC’s Leslie Josephs contributed to this article. More